The Display & Rules step controls where a campaign is visible and how it behaves alongside sale prices and real WooCommerce coupons.
Where the ladder shows
Show in Cart and Show in Checkout are independent — you can run a campaign on one page only, for example showing it in the cart to encourage upsells but keeping checkout free of distractions. Enable Progress Bar adds a visual bar alongside the message text; turning it off leaves just the written message from the Messages step.
If Side Cart is also installed and active on your store, the same campaign automatically appears inside its drawer too, using these same toggles — there is no separate on/off switch for the drawer.
Sale-priced products
The Sale Products setting decides whether items that are currently on sale take part in the campaign:
- Count at sale price — sale items count toward the steps at the price they actually sell for, and they get the percentage or fixed discount like any other product.
- Don’t count — sale items are left out completely: they don’t count toward the steps and they don’t get the percentage or fixed discount. The discount is calculated from, and applied to, the other products only. Example: a 20 € sale item and a 1 200 € regular item with a 10% step — the reward is 120 €, all of it on the regular item.
“Don’t count” protects your margin on products that are already discounted; “Count at sale price” is more generous to shoppers building a cart during a promotion. Free shipping and gift rewards are not affected by this setting beyond the steps they unlock. New campaigns start on Count at sale price.
When sale products are in the cart
With “Don’t count”, a shopper who adds a sale product sees the progress bar stay where it is, which can look broken. This setting decides what they are told:
- Explain (default) — the progress message stays as it is, and a small note with an info icon appears under the bar, plus a label on each sale product in the cart.
- Hide if only sale items — while the cart holds only sale products, no progress is shown at all; as soon as it also holds a regular product, it works like Explain.
- Show as is — nothing extra: the bar and message show without any explanation, as in versions before 1.19.
With Explain or Hide if only sale items, two texts appear below the setting:
- Note under the progress bar — default “Sale items don’t count toward this offer”. It shows while sale products are in the cart and the top step is not yet reached, and can use variables such as
{excluded_amount}and{excluded_count}— see Writing progress messages. - Label on sale products — default “Not included (sale item)”, shown under each sale product on the Cart and Checkout pages (classic and block versions), in the mini cart and in the Side Cart drawer (Side Cart 1.11.0 or later).
Leave either text empty to show nothing in its place. The Preview step can show the note with a sample sale product in the cart.
Coupon behaviour
Coupons decides whether a WooCommerce coupon code and this campaign can both be active on the same cart.
- Disable with coupon (default) — as soon as a shopper applies any coupon code, the campaign’s reward and its progress message are switched off for that cart, and come back if the coupon is removed. This is expected behaviour, not an error — if shoppers report that “the discount disappeared”, check whether they applied a coupon.
- Allow with coupon — the coupon and the campaign reward both apply, each on its own line in the totals.
A coupon with Individual use only ticked always switches the campaign’s percentage or fixed reward off, whichever mode you choose — that is what “individual use” means in WooCommerce.
Percentage discount base only matters when coupons are allowed and a percentage step is reached. Example with a 100 € cart, a 10% campaign step and a 10 € coupon:
- Regular price — the campaign gives 10% of the cart before the coupon: 10 €. Total: 80 €.
- Discounted price — the campaign gives 10% of the cart after the coupon: 9 €. Total: 81 €.
WooCommerce’s “Calculate coupon discounts sequentially”
This WooCommerce setting (WooCommerce → Settings → General) only changes how your own coupons combine with each other. The campaign reward is always the amount the campaign promises, whether it is on or off.
Good to know
- WooCommerce shares a fixed cart coupon evenly per product, not by price, so a cheap product can end up at 0 after such a coupon. That is how WooCommerce coupons work on their own, not the campaign.
- With Smart Cross Sell, bundle prices are lowered first; the campaign and coupons are then calculated from those bundle prices.